


confluence

by ignitesthestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, rey flirts with the dark side, the lightsabers are a metaphor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 16:31:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12112725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: an act or process of merging.She wants to tear him to pieces.It’s an ugly, primal thing. It burrows under Rey’s skin like some kind of insect digging into her flesh and feasting. She’d seen people waste away on Jakku, consumed by a parasite from the inside out.Maybe that’s what prompts her to hunt him down





	confluence

She wants to tear him to pieces.

It’s an ugly, primal thing. It burrows under Rey’s skin like some kind of insect digging into her flesh and feasting. She’d seen people waste away on Jakku, consumed by a parasite from the inside out. 

Maybe that’s what prompts her to hunt him down. She has to excise him from her psyche, even if that means cutting herself open to do it.

“You’ve gotten stronger.” 

There’s a yellow sheen to those dark eyes as he surveys her, surrounded by the unconscious forms of his Stormtrooper guards in his shuttle. She wonders if it makes others afraid. It looks weak to her, sickly; she lifts her chin and keeps her grip on his grandfather’s lightsaber, but he doesn’t look away from her face.

“I stopped running away.”

He steps in towards her, over one of the troopers. Like she hasn’t just taken out his guard, like she isn’t every bit as dangerous as he is. Like he isn’t wearing the proof of that on his face, a stark and angry red against his too-pale skin.

Smug satisfaction coils in her gut, and there’s a moment there where they both know she could have killed him in that forest. If she hadn’t chosen Finn, if she hadn’t turned her back, Kylo Ren would be dead and Rey would be…

Something else. 

Her fingers wrap around the hilt of the lightsaber. Plasma hisses to life as her thumb slides over the ignition, and she can see the curl of his mouth lifting from the shadows cast over them both.

“You can’t expect me to believe that Luke Skywalker encouraged you to fight me.” His arm flicks out to the side, spitting out his own weapon. The crackling power beats a strange tattoo into her skull; she remembers being afraid the first time she heard it, but there’s only an eagerness in her chest now.

“Luke doesn’t own me.”

“I know the feeling.”

He steps anti-clockwise, eyes never leaving her face. She echoes the motion, and a frisson of foreboding shivers down her spine for the first time since she took out his troopers. Rey had circled him before, a predator in the snow, but he’s not on the ground now and she’s not sure if she’s chasing or following.

“You don’t know anything about me.” Her lightsaber cracks forward with her voice, cutting through whatever game he’s trying to set up here.

He catches the blade against his and then they’re fighting in earnest, the cramped quarters of his shuttle constraining their battle, cutting off the rest of the world until it’s only Rey and Kylo Ren and two impossible weapons clashing in the dark.

“I know you were abandoned,” he says steadily. There’s not even a hitch in her breathing, and it occurs to Rey that she’s not the only one who’s gotten stronger. 

_The hiss of that red blade sliding through Han Solo’s ribs is cut off by her own cry of denial, of everything she thought she had found suddenly slipping off the edge of a walkway into nothingness. She remembers this fear, this loss - even with Finn next to her, she knows this sudden hole in her gut where someone she cared about used to live._

_Rey had stuffed it with hope and denial before. But as she and Finn run into the cold, she finds herself fuelled by something else. Something new._

_Rage keeps her warm, if nothing else._

“I know you were disappointed. Luke Skywalker was supposed to be the answer, wasn’t he? The grand saviour with all the answers, who turned out to know nothing at all.”

“Do you always talk this much?” she growls. Her chest rises and falls with the effort of fending him off, and when was she forced into defense anyway?

“Only around you, it seems.”

She punches him. That satisfaction roars in her gut as he reels back in shock, and she’s made him bleed again. She bares her teeth at him, bearing down with a flurry of blows that shoves him into the wall of his shuttle, the end goal of which she’s not sure anymore. She doesn’t even know that she came here to kill him.

She just wants him to hurt.

“Red’s a good look on you,” she snarls. “And if you think I’m ever letting you into my head again, you are _sorely_ mistak--”

One gloved hand blocks her next blow. Not gripping her weapon, nothing that suicidal, just a clenched fist held between them. No matter how hard she pushes, she can’t seem to break through the wall of his will. He uses her distraction to straighten again and _stang_ he’s tall.

It occurs to Rey that he has spent the majority of their encounters stooping to meet her. The thought leaves an acrid taste in the back of her throat as that wall of Force turns on her, an inexorable weight trying to - what? Crush her into the ground?

 _No_ , she thinks, reaching through the galaxy and into that warm presence she has begun to know as power. _Trying to hold me in place._ It flares hotter with every second she can’t reach him until she is burning, burning, a scream caught in her throat and just waiting for her to hurl it at him.

He shakes. She can see it in his hand, in the flicker of that sick gaze, but his lightsaber has disengaged and the fight has moved to a terrain that Rey can’t quite grasp the edges of.

“It’s okay,” he says again, like the last time he said it was seconds ago and not months. “I feel it too.”

It’s just a second. A breath, one sharp inhale that tastes like empathy instead of anger. It snakes through the wall of her will and shatters it; the scream in her throat turns into a cry as one knee buckles under her and Rey drops, Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber rolling out of her suddenly nervous grasp.

_“I won’t stop you,” Luke says. The creases in his face draw together into something impossibly sad. “But before you go - Rey, consider what it is you’re hoping to find.”_

_She sets her jaw. “Have you ever been powerless?”_

_“Not in the way you mean, I think.”_

_“Then I don’t think you can understand what it is I’m looking for.”_

He takes the lightsaber. 

He leaves her behind.


End file.
